Modern computer networks are capable of delivering ever-increasing quantities of multimedia data to end-user recipients. In a conventional data communications network system, a media content provider delivers real-time audio and video images in a continuous sequence of packets called a media stream, or so-called streaming audio and video.
Conventional media providers employ the existing conventional network infrastructure, including TELOPS POTS lines, coaxial lines carrying cable TV signals, fiber optic lines, high-volume trunks and other interconnections supporting Internet and other related networks for transmitting media content. Consumer demand for media content services, such as streaming audio and video services, often drives network bandwidth capacity of the conventional infrastructure to its limit. Accordingly, conventional media content providers employ optimizing techniques such as compression, multiplexing, and deployment of new and additional hardware capable of increased throughput, and driven by processors at higher and higher frequencies (speeds).
One such optimizing technique is the use of multicast streams operable to deliver a single streaming audio or video content source to a plurality, or set, of recipients called a multicast group. In a conventional multicast stream, recipients elect to join a multicast group corresponding to the stream. The routers or other intermediary devices in the network propagate the membership of such a multicast group including each of the recipients to which the multicast stream is to be delivered across the network. Conventional Internet Protocol (IP) methods propagate packets in the stream to the multicast group according to a known protocol outlined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in RFC 1075: Distance Vector Multicast Routing Protocol (DVMRP), and in RFC 3376: Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP), and others, as is known to those skilled in the art.
Such a conventional media provider, therefore, establishes a set of recipients of the particular media content source as a multicast group, according to the known multicast protocol. The media content provider transmits a single multicast stream, therefore requiring transmission resources only for the individual multicast stream, rather than for allocating separate transmission resources for individual streams from the content provider to each of the plurality of users included in the multicast group. In this manner, a single stream emanates from the media content provider for multicast transmission to each of the multicast group recipients.
Conventional media content providers typically receive revenue from such streaming media on a fee-for-service is basis, such as via a so-called pay-per-view broadcast. Conventional multicast groups, therefore, provide a vehicle to maximize service delivery, and therefore the revenue, from each of multiple recipients, while allocating only a single transmission stream resource, therefore freeing up other transmission stream resources for other recipients.